A tower solar thermal power generation system has many advantageous characteristics, such as a wide matching setting range for a temperature field and an energy field, a large condenser ratio, a high focusing temperature, a large energy flow density, a high thermal conversion efficiency, a wide application range, and so on, and thus the system can perform many developments of applications of solar energy, such as solar thermal power generation, hydrogen production from water, sea water desalination, metal smelting, and so on, on a large scale. Therefore, the tower solar thermal power generation system is a platform for diversified utilization of solar energy, which has much value potential.
There have been many developed countries which have carried out the research of tower solar power technology. However, up to now the development of the technology is still subjected to many obstacles because of two main reasons: first, the cost of heliostat tracking is too high, because the accuracy requirement of long-distance tracking is very high, also gear wheels must achieve seamless transmissions, and thus the difficult production caused by this requirement is one of the reason leading to high tracking cost; secondly, the scale of this power generation may be too small, so that the power generation capacity expansion is greatly limited; since the scale of tower power generation depends on the scale of the heliostat field, the larger the scale of thermal power generation, the greater the cost reduction space; however, when the scale of the heliostat field is expanded to a certain extent, its overall efficiency will appear a sharply decreased downtrend. Therefore, the power generation cost of current tower solar power generation systems remains at a high level, which is still far from the market requirements.